


Brew my tea, and snip my thread

by Radiolaria



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Banter, F/M, Fluff, Humor, Innuendo, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-27
Updated: 2013-06-27
Packaged: 2017-12-16 07:28:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/859488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If only she could anchor him, for short, she would prove herself she still withholds that reality, that corporeality.<br/>She halted time for him and he would not stop, even for a second.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brew my tea, and snip my thread

**Author's Note:**

> Happy River Eleven Appreciation Day.
> 
> Title from Penelope by Dorothy Parker

From time to time, the faintest doubt seizes her. The nagging feeling that she bound herself to an idea, a phantasm, a ghost. Mere movement and energy weaving into each other to keep her from her drifting and forgetting she is, herself, more than a name appearing in History books. That the many identities she endorses, were they impressed on the retina of dreamers or the dead stone of monuments, are not characters she wove, threading their faults and faces, spinning and plaiting the shards of life before letting them fray in time. They are no phantoms, they are stories. She was. She is only casting a net of identities and lives before her to catch him, somewhere, in his spontaneous pattern of running and stealing.

They are voracious creatures, her little chimeras, her Melody Malone, Cleopatra, Theda Bara, Madame de Lafayette, Marie Duval, Oscar Wilde and Co., demanding. Her fingers know the paths to hundreds of garments and corsets, the slant to thousands of hats, the billows of ribbons and wires from all of time and space. At times, she can’t find the seam. She wonders how she has slipped into the outfit in the first place. If she went right through the thickness, skin and fabric merging. If there was even a time when she was out of it.

Her diary is there to remind her of the strong nuclear force at work within her body. Within her life. Within the prints and volutes, and pulp and whiteness of her fingertips. She is. Still. Not always. But still.

She mastered the fleshing of herself as she did with the faint fresco she has to stare at for hours. That curve is an arm brandishing a weapon and that brightness a helmet of Etruscan curls. And sometimes she is the soldier, fighting the primordial fires in worlds she can travel. Her students never find her amidst the trenches and temples, plastered between the warriors and priests. Spirited in. Stepping out of History to teach them.

In her desolated ever moving life, real is the touch of his fingertips, the burn of the sun, the egde of the papers. He twirls and chirps and waltzes, never stopping, almost looking through. Does she have a reality outside his hearts and her parents’? Does Professor River Song teach at the Luna University? Melody Pond is, River Song is a story written in his. She lets the in-takes of air slow down and deepen until her vision goes blurry and she can pretend it is side effects of life.

If only she could  anchor him, for short, she would prove herself she still withholds that reality, that corporeality.

She halted time for him and he would not stop, even for a second. 

 

***

 

Papers are everywhere and her desk bears an uncanny resemblance with a beach after the storm. Pens and notes, sheets stabbed by pencils, her watch seems to have disappeared in the deep of her case and her water bottle is nowhere to be found. At some point during her lecture, she lost track of reality and sunk. In History, in legends, in artefacts. She got drunk on her own words. Living lives she could never had –and some she had. Sometimes bolder, sometimes shorter, sometimes boring. Cleansing her skin from River Song.

Having trouble grasping on reality has an advantage; she can slip out of her self  any time she wants.

“Professor Song.”

The lanky figure of one of her students is at her sides and she doesn’t remember seeing him approach.  Sharp and grey, he is Geldian; hands folded before his chest, an alabaster priest of the ancient times; she likes Geldian, a dream to look at and so very quiet. She diverts her eyes, aware of the nature of her thoughts before the smooth perfect skin and long limbs –she really needs to get hold of the Doctor.

“Yes?” She thinks she has a very vague idea of his name and would not risk it. Of course there is always a possibility he really is not one of her students –he would not be the first to consult her on a point her colleagues might have not accurately dealt with. Logical. They did not witness it.

A time travelling teacher doesn‘t keep in the shadows for long.

The student seems worried by her drifting attention but would display the very Geldian discretion and discard it accordingly. “Are you … married?”

She chokes on air. Not what she expected.

“Are you joking?”

“Am not. It is a class question”

He seems dreadfully serious, and conscientious, which makes it even worse. _Cautious_ , she ventures, it might be a prank. Doctor Castel still has not forgiven her for the mess in his collection; how could she expect the Doctor to drop on her while she was searching for a particular shell, literally drop on her from the TARDIS who had landed on the ceiling. Of course, they were under no obligation whatsoever to start and get it on in the middle of the collection in disarray, but she had not seen him for so long and the TARDIS was not an option at the moment – at least not without a grappling iron. She snapped back to the student –really Geldian are the worst distraction.

“Why, it really is none of your concern.” She resumes her clearing of the desk, opting for the rather bulldozer-like approach.

He takes a deep breath before attacking the reason of his visit with a shrill, obviously deeply embarrassed –for a Geldian. Without a pause, words toppling on one another.

“Because in Professor Brecht’s class we were studying a bas-relief from the ‘ty civilisation and he began translating and… Well, everything was normal, the engraving was going on and on about the rite of spring then suddenly… Hmm, it was all _River dear, I can’t seem to bump into you, except I really need a you that had done the Klop falls. Where in the name of Vasseline or Rassolan, something like that_ ”, she rolls her eyes, agonising, “ _did you put my water-proof scanner? While searching for it, I may have displaced your collection of high heels – seriously River, how many do you have? - and lost the brace of one of your bras –you know the emerald one I don’t like because it’s so ridiculously difficult to ungraft and_ …” With a muffled throat clearing, he shifts on his feet, lightly but loudly –it happens when you are made of stone. Her hands suspended, stupid and frankly unable to lift her eyes from the bag on her chair.

“Okay, please stop… I get it.” She brings a palm to her face, annoyed at the warmth spreading steadily on her cheeks. “When did Professor Brecht realise…”

The student has a stricken expression on the face.

“He was on automatic mode” he squeaks. “I’m very sorry, I think he ranted about bringing tea and scones the next time, then stopped at some circular drawings he could not translate, which is weird. His program is supposed to...”

“On a ‘ty bas-relief… Great, I will have another dozens of Time agents on my back. Of course he couldn’t use Gallifreyan for the whole thing, but still that would have prevented…” With a sweep of the arm, she finishes clearing the table. “That’s alright. Perfect.” A forced smile shoots on her lips. “Yes, I’m married but really to an idiot. So, you need not worry, I’m still far from becoming a respectable woman.”

Her dignified exit is rather rendered unspectacular by the loud and very dusty irruption in the class room of the Doctor pursued by a horde of tiny dinosaurs.

 

***

 

He has just received her from one of her jumps; top of the Sagrada Familia, with the Spanish Inquisition on her heels, whose representatives he then proceeds to fish, literally fish, one by one, to bring them back to the right time period.

She jumps to her feet and dusts her rags off, discarding the dagger and grappling iron she had attached to her belt. The suspicious and quite desperate glance he casts her brings a proud smile to her face and she begins waltzing towards the console.

“I won’t dare to ask how you got into that much trouble, with the Inquisition and possibly with today’s Spanish Church when they will realise what you did to their spire.” He huffs, rubbing his face with resignation. “What on earth were you attempting to achieve? No wonder they can’t complete it if you keep defacing the monument.”

He is quite frankly too flabbergasted to even comment on her taking the command of the ship.

“It’s only the third time, you know. I think it is a glitch in the Vortex Manipulator.” She shrugs. “Whenever I travel in Spain, the stop-over at the Sagrada seems inevitable before I can properly take off. It’s really odd.”

She’s all wide flounces, dusty curls, swirling around the console and he wonders what really went down in that cathedral. Except not really. Reading the bruises and scratches, the taste of soil on her skin is a riddle in itself. The time he can spend on the bugling of that muscle, deducing she went into a fight with a Silurian; that pale spot and that scorched nail. Words and stories on her skin. Stories she never needs to tell. She is still too young to realise it, of course, unfortunately babbles away the twist and turn of the plot and showers just after, leaving him only those brief moments to guess and invents her a life. Imagining the brightest, most outrageous adventures without him and then planning ahead wackier ones for the both of them. It is a constant gamble. He reads, he guesses and, considering what he came up with, attempts to blow her mind.  

She is his favourite hero and doesn’t know it yet.

It pains him also.

He would want her to know, as early as possible how much he loves and admires her. As she did.

She halts her frantic typing on the keyboard and spins to face him, a concerned mask over her features.

“Correct me if I’m wrong. But…” She strides in his direction, trying half too hard to appear confident when asking something completely silly –which he achieved. “Did I see you?”

He widens his eyes, attentive, bemused and excited. This could be the beginning of an interesting evening. She frowns, misunderstanding his expression, and corrects herself.

“I mean when I was falling, I saw the TARDIS.”

He widens his eyes even more, and she lets out a tiny grunt, nearly stamping her feet on the floor in annoyance.

“Another TARDIS! With you watching down on me.” The inquiring pout on her lips is adorable and he has half a mind to bop her nose. But bites his tongue and edges close. He can practically see her pricking up her ears.

“Have you seen your face, when you are falling?”

“Obviously not”, she tartly answers.

“I went back and had a look. Once.” He rests on the counter, propped up on his elbow, and she leans in, inches from his face, all ears. “Have been looking ever since. Your face is the most glorious thing there is; loose and alight; about to let out a scream; or a bubble, and that doubt on your lips is quite…”

She knits her eyebrows, confused and not flattered.

“I did notice you had a tendency to show up at the most random moment. But this is… there are two of you? Surely you could put that trick to better use than snooping on your wife falling off building.”

He dreams, drawing circles on the panels, oblivious to her reasoning, eyes set to the shiny surface and the trails his finger is leaving.

“I wish I could dive forth and kiss your lips at that moment. And make love to you.”

She snorts this time, not trying to conceal her bafflement.

“In mid-air? You have to find a planet with a very interesting atmosphere to do that. Call me when you’ve found it.”

She would have carried on about the possibility for such a planet to be found on the Dagmar system, but he lifts his gaze to her and her voice dies in her throat, muted. He stares.

“Have I your attention now Doctor Song?” he asks, voice low and teasing. Unbearably so.

“Complete.”

It seems he will have his game of clue reading -and finding- after all.

Finding River is, a little, watching her learn. And be baffled, by herself.

 

***

 

He carefully unfolds the paper wrapping the box. It must be strange for him to receive proper mail, carried by a post-man –granted, it must have been an intergalactic one. She can hear the slight rustle of his fingers brushing the kraft, nails scraping the surface, steady and lithe, like the signal a lover would leave at night on his mistress’ door, and suddenly she envies the box. Gingerly she frets with expectation.

Finally the box is opened with a cry of surprise and nearly ends up on the floor of the TARDIS

She cheers.

“River, what are you doing here?” He is properly in a rage, looking down on her, appalled and not even bewitched. She can see the hand not holding the box flailing behind his head, directionless. “Did you just send yourself by the mail?”

She nods, fighting back the smile as she witnesses his agonisingly flustered embarrassment. Baby face, he has no idea how bizarre the ride is going to be. His eyes are boggling out of their sockets and his eyebrows -or lack of- are about to complete the ascension of his forehead. Her cheeks might be aching.

“Did you… Are you…” He stutters, at loss for words. He points at her and she stretches to grip the extremity of his forefinger. “Mini River, really? Is it really all you could find to find me?”

Evidently it is not about finding him or the right him. Skill and style. She climbs and settles astride on his joint. Immediately he drops the box on the floor, lifting a hand in cup under her to prevent her from falling. He carries her, precious miniature and she swoons.

“Are you out of your mind?” he barks.

“Am not. It was a perfectly good idea.”

She wriggles on the spot and in a rush he jumps to the console to deposit her on a surface flat enough. He scuttles away from her and begins circling the rotor.  

“River, River, that is just dumb.” He babbles for himself, while the TARDIS delightfully whirs under her and produces, out of a panel she never spotted before, a tiny armchair. “Don’t encourage her! You never do dumb things, why would you do dumb things?”

The console slope helping, she clambers to the armchair and curls up there. The consideration enters her mind it might be high time to reassure him. She brandishes a small device, looking pretty much like a speaker with ears and explains.

“We acquired one for a particularly delicate dig.”

“Requiring minute archaeologists”, he harrumphs, mocking.

“We used baby hair for the quartering.” She deadpans. ”The work done, I decided to have a little fun.”

He stops striding, hands on his hips, looking up in anguish.

“And miniaturised yourself to fit in a mailing box!”

Her hands are folded under her chin, confident and definitely pleased with herself.

“Sweetie, think of the possibilities.”

“That’s exactly what I am thinking about, River.” He chokes. “Do you realise you could have been sent… Rassilon knows where?”

“I was never in the box before it reached the TARDIS”, she lectures with a display of her Vortex Manipulator. “I only locked the coordinates so that…”

“I don’t care”, he roars, sending his hands flapping the air. “Tiny River! “ He erratically gestures in her direction, obviously disoriented in his estimating her size. “You’re tiny and you’re River. Anything could happen!”

And it does.

“Ahoy, there”, rings a clear voice, female and northern, a teensy bit the latter, very much the former. River frowns and clambers on the arms to take a look at the woman ascending the stairs, brown-haired, short-framed. Companion-like. Yet, before she can do so much as determine the colour of the newcomer’s eyes, the Doctor scrambles to block her view, bum against the console, for her pleasure and his demise.

“What are you looking at, Doctor?” The woman behind the idiot of a husband she inherited from herself cranes her neck above his shoulder, trying to take a peek behind the Doctor. River has time enough to glimpse at an upturned nose and finely arched eyebrows before the woman backs away, rightfully unable to trust her eyes.

“Doctor, there is a tiny woman in there. A tiny woman.” River can hear her wail, as if addressing a dangerously annoying child.  She seizes a lever conveniently dislodged and begins poking at him. Marry the man of many companions, they say. Bask in his exponential discomfort.

He wobbles on the spot, plastering a wide embarrassed grin on his features –River can tell by the way his jaws and top hair are shifting-, his hands opened on the surface behind.

“No, dear. Trust me.”

The brunette beyond clears her throat and he wiggles his fingers, attracting River’s attention. He has it and abandoning the stick, she slips out of the armchair, down by the panel. The TARDIS is grunting underneath, tickling her spine.

“It is none of your concern. Time Lord stuff. Stuffy TARDIS thing. ” His hand is still open on the console, waiting, wiggling and she is tempted to wander in the direction of his arse and swat him.

While River hauls herself up in his hand, the probably companionable subject must be staring unconvinced at the Doctor, because he starts swaying, which promises a joyous climb. He squirms with each step she makes progressing on his hand and soon, secure in his palm, she nestles against the pulp and he represses a giggle at the contact of her warm little body.

“It’s a… bolt!” he exclaims and she whines, outraged. Proud of himself. ”Nut and bolt.”

“Screw you!” she shouts at the top of her lungs; in retaliation he cages her in his hands, behind his back and she can’t understand a word the Doctor and the brunette are exchanging afterwards. She does not need to know though.

Within a second, she senses him scurrying down stairs and rushing and running and she knows all too well he has no problem anymore with a tiny River.

 

***

 

River isn’t there. Clara, for once, isn’t there. And he feels, not just alone but strangely dissociating, lacking in matter. He lounges on the floor, fiddles with cables that appear afterwards not to be connected to anything, even checks his answer phone.

Nothing. Life doesn’t run at his speed and it is boring. He runs at the speed of time; time has none. But he has time. Rather, he and River. The thought of all those notes and messages scattered across the Universe catches up with him. River, making the Universe his home, when he has none left, his clever girl. Engraving and marking the world to make it his. He cannot find his home anymore but River is better. He just has to follow her. He sits up on the floor, excitement soaring in his chests, taking hold of his hearts, making him see sparkles… _Wait, that’s not very reassuring_ , he remarks to himself.

A pang of electricity crosses the space between his eyes and he is knocked down on the floor.

In an instant, she is all over him and he can’t see her, but thin air around him. He feels her body, characteristic perfume and suppleness, flooding him, with her curves and curls, and he has not enough hands to hold her and keep those infuriating hair from her sunny face. He just misses her beguiling smile; he takes, willingly, not satisfied but grateful.

She is holding tight, her skin and clothes very soft and warm against him. She sits back, still on top of him.

“Hello”, her voice is confident and plum, a smile hanging.

“Hello”, he sings back, breathless, hesitating before pulling her down to his level and kissing her as gently as he could, as tenderly also, tasting everything that is real about her, memorising all the details of her again and again –also he cannot see where her nose is which she seems to find hysterical. Quite surely his dreams are not that explosive and smooth, that bright, that River. This is more.

“You’re not really there.” It is a statement. She is on a dig, these days, or in prison, or in the library. As always. It depends. They still have time. It doesn’t really bother him, he just wishes she would find less efficient ways to keep him never alone.

Telepathic call. Except something went wrong with the eyesight transition.

He is surprised she knows his number. But River would know that.

“You are a most dangerous woman River Song”, he growls within.

“Am I? I really wouldn’t have suspected.”

“Get out of my head.” He feels her lips on his cheek, smiling.

“So I can’t see your true self?”

“So I can see you, bloody woman.”

“I wander here and there, I’m a thought…” As she sing-songs she dances against him, very corporeal indeed.

He lets out a grunt of frustration.

“I know for a fact there is a thought who is going to experience presently an intense swat on the bum if she doesn’t get out of my brain. The connection is two-way, you know, and I’m pretty sure I don’t need a map to find your arse, even blind.”

In response, she just crushes him, arms opening wide and round to catch him. He feels lost in her. All the more as he cannot see her, gripping her body and holding.

“Are you okay?” she inquires, almost timid.

“I missed you…”

Her hands are playing with his hair, unscrewing and pulling. Warm breath brushing his ears.

“No, _I_ missed you. In the Gondawa system. I arrived and the entire population was raging against two brunettes who had just blown up the temple.”

“We didn’t blow up the temple.”

“Well, I don’t call that not blowing up a 2000 year sacred temple when all is left could basically be used to sand their beach…”

“River! There was a space worm underneath slowly eating her way out to die and you know what happens when they die. It could have destroyed the entire planet…”

“So you blew him up?” She smooths the width of his shirt and he fights with air to get her off his chest, finding her invisible hands and, triumphant, boldly placing them on his scalp. She massages, her fingers as needles connecting and dancing.

“Her. Pay attention” he musically scolds. “And no, we managed to create some transportation beam to send her back home where she could die in peace without annihilating an entire civilisation, but the remaining energy from the transportation…”

“Reduced the temple above to dust. I get it.”

He stills. Everything is normal and quiet. He knows in the kitchen a pot of tea is boiling, he heard someone tip toes behind. He knows it is River.

Somehow the casualness of their exchange, given the strangeness of the circumstances, comes as a baffling realisation. It feels exactly as talking to any silly, common wife about his day at work, dinner cooking and children out to play. She waited for him, for that moment, when he talks and he listens, contented, savouring the fruits of waiting for her. She probably rehearsed and planned, researched and drew those tiny domestic moments, preparing. And them reunited, the plan unravels.

Seeing each other is a tricky adventure, akin to that of a funambulist.  She is the rope, he is the foot, and their point of contact, minute and vital, thin as a thread. Thoughts and muscles focused on those lithe fibres and nerves ensuring their life. She cuts him, he wears her. And they would never relinquish the electric cord tensing their body with each ride. Sometimes he fears she would snap; her fear lays in his voracious desire to fall and topple, impulse to let go, vertigo singing the edges of his mind and dangling him there. He falls but always catches her; he scorches his fingers on her skin.

And their dates are circus shows, colours abound and beasts loose. Clowns and acrobats, they never know who is going to make it to the end of the performance, of the lover or the opponent. By the end of the day, he realises, how impossible, how unnatural their lives are. Yet, on the spur of the moment, at the heart of the uproar, while they are running and shouting and the Sontarans are again trying to besiege the TARDIS –not the smartest move- he becomes aware of the granted stability of their life. An equilibrium still is an oscillation. They just move quickly and lighter. 

And she follows, wherever and whenever, even a step ahead. Ariadne of sort. Not an anchor but a thread for him to follow.

Her pace is unheard, unread of and he wonders how she manages to live so many lives, when he is so old and so worn, with memories wide and layered. How she feeds and nurtures her wild heart and pounding imaginary. Boundless, one life would be too much for her to live the way she does.

“Thank you”, she whispers and her breath cools. The ties on his mind loosen and she slips out of his hands. Leaving him stranded and confused on his ship floor.

From the kitchen flutter spicy fumes and sweet scents. And purrs a throaty, delicious: “Did you truthfully think the scanner was in my _drawer_? Sweetie, you should know better. It is in the emerald bathroom.”

 

***

 

Finding him is fleeing and waiting.

She runs and baits him, leaving here and there messages and graffito. He leaves clumsy little notes and screeds, as if he hasn’t been the one roaming the Universe for centuries and centuries. He leaves blunders and bodies behind. She always finds his clues, in museums and dark forests, on the bottom of the ocean or on the forehead of the King of England. He regularly misses hers –and purposefully she suspects, she can see the fun in that; the thought comforts her, of generations of students and historians baffled before her sexting in ancient Greek or sharing scones recipe in binary codes.

Like seeds in time, her notes weave their domesticity, the one they could never have, with kitchen traffic jams and extemporaneous fits of shuffling slippers, battles over the temperature of their room, the fluff of her pajamas, the unexpected visit of Camus between the sheets –“River, that’s the second time this week he poked me in the ribs!” “Sweetie, you really are not required to jump into bed. Besides we have no bedside table and I don’t want to leave this edition on the floor.” “The TARDIS is impeccably clean.” “I found a custard pie hooked on the antigrav chain.”

She doesn’t want to fight him because he is childish and she has to preserve their timeline. Doesn’t want to fight over a chunk of regeneration energy. Doesn’t want to squander time over his worrying for her.

Instead, she pours their non-existent everyday life into History; a hint for him to buy her _that_ dress in the Bayeux tapestry; a reminder to change the Applejuice carburettor of the Old Girl on the third lost pilaster of Icthar; a kiss on a Canova Sculpture.  Unanswered calls, unrequited silences across the galaxies, a vast fairy tale of signs and signs waiting to be deciphered.

They fight over aliens and misplaced artefacts, over the shade they should choose for a phone box, over who gets to top when they are in free fall, over the perfection that is a chess game when one is miniaturised. It is insanity, and nowhere in History she dreams of finding such everyday life. She stiches, he picks the threads and they hold.

When River Song is not a story, she writes it. She is sign, she is symbol. She undertook the impossible task to turn him into an archaeologist.

And bespoke creator, she reimagines a Universe he can at last understand and work, the idiot.


End file.
